Republicans can try to spin this all they want, but the inescapable truth is that punishing women is what the GOP assault on our reproductive rights has always been about.

The truth is that, by the time a woman has had to drive hundreds of miles or travel to another state to have an abortion, she’s already been punished for having one.

Every woman who’s been forced to wait 24 hours to have an abortion—or who’s had to face violent, violating and intimidating threats before she gets one—has also been punished for having one.

As has every woman who just didn’t have the money to pay for an abortion or to get to the nearest clinic or to find a place to stay or to cover the cost of childcare while she was there.

And all the women who’ve been forced to undergo invasive medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds or to view sonogram photos against their will or who’ve turned to what they think is an abortion clinic to ask for help, only to be traumatized and coerced with inaccurate medical information and coercive propaganda? They’re being punished, too—every day and all across the country.

The increasingly extreme—and increasingly punitive—policies Republicans have been pushing for decades now to restrict women’s access to abortion aren’t about “scientific evidence.” They never have been.